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You Can Name the Tune, but Does It Fit the Plot?

No one knows for sure what Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys were thinking when they wrote "Car Crazy Cutie," but it's hard to imagine they thought they were writing a heartfelt reconciliation song.

Yet, sure enough, halfway through the first act of "Good Vibrations," the new Beach Boys musical at the Eugene O'Neill Theater, it is "Car Crazy Cutie" -- which includes ample use of the phrase "doo run run" -- that is sung by a guy trying to woo back his girl.

That seeming disconnect was just one of the many problems that critics found with "Good Vibrations," which opened to a bundle of bad reviews on Feb. 2. But it highlights the challenges faced by writers of so-called catalog, or jukebox, musicals, an increasingly popular form of show in which a new story is woven around existing hit songs.

In addition to the Beach Boys, the music of two other musical icons is being mined for shows that are expected on Broadway this year: Elvis Presley, whose music is featured in "All Shook Up," which begins previews on Sunday at the Palace Theater, and John Lennon, whose songs form the spine of the biographical musical "Lennon," due at the Broadhurst Theater in July. "Jersey Boys," the Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons musical, is also considered a possibility for Broadway this year. Several others, including one based on the music of Bob Dylan (developed by the choreographer and director Twyla Tharp) and another on Bruce Springsteen's songs, are in the works. The rise of the jukebox musical comes at a time when Broadway producers seem increasingly unable to consistently strike gold with either overtly campy new work ("Taboo," "Bombay Dreams"), high-minded, chamber-opera fare ("Caroline, or Change") or movie-inspired shows ("Never Gonna Dance," "Footloose"). Add to that the near-complete inability of contemporary Broadway songs to crack the Top 40 list, and the appeal of the jukebox musical becomes even more apparent: here, it seems, is a prepackaged score guaranteed to be hummable and requiring no expensive stars.

The most successful example of this breed, of course, is "Mamma Mia!," the global sing-along to an inventory of hits by the Swedish group Abba, which has grossed more than $1 billion in ticket sales worldwide. The show, devised by the British producer Judy Craymer, with a book by Catherine Johnson, opened in London in the summer of 1999, transferred to Broadway in 2001 and currently has 14 productions around the world in seven different languages.

But even Ms. Craymer admits there is a certain madness in the method of making catalog shows. "It's really doing things upside down," she said last week by telephone, adding that she would very likely never try another one. "Usually you write the story first and then the songs are inspired by the story," she explained. "This is a whole different way of doing things."

And it's not always successful. While "Mamma Mia!" and "Movin' Out," the Billy Joel-Twyla Tharp collaboration, are Broadway hits, in London, where the form is even more popular, a series of high-profile catalog shows have flopped, including efforts by groups like the Pet Shop Boys and Madness. "We Will Rock You," a catalog show based on the music of Queen, did moderately well, but avoided transferring to Broadway in favor of the less critic-laden land of Las Vegas.

In the case of "Good Vibrations," the producers said they found the process of making a storyline out of hundreds of Beach Boys songs much harder than they had expected. "We first thought about doing a revue type of thing," said Nina Keneally, the show's lead producer. "But then we thought if we could craft a story around the songs, we could take the music to a whole other level. But, of course, easier said than done."

In particular, the problem for "Good Vibrations," and other jukebox shows, is that the song lyrics cannot be altered to fit the sentiments of the characters who sing them. So in many places, Ms. Keneally's creative team -- including the director John Carrafa and the book writer Richard Dresser -- was forced to rely on staging that had to substitute for some of the lyrics, which were themselves trimmed to make the songs jibe more closely with the plot.

Even so, some of the Beach Boys' most famous songs, including "Little Deuce Coupe," simply could not be wedged into the story. "You can't lyrically try to make everything fit," Ms. Keneally said, "because that's a road to bedlam."

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Instead, she said, the idea was to use the songs as "tent poles," between which the plot could be threaded. But that story -- boy meets girl, goes to California, loses girl, surfs, gets girl back -- did little to thrill critics. Writing in The New York Times, Ben Brantley called the show "a lumbering, brainless Frankenstein's monster," "a singing headache" and a "rickety jukebox." (And those were some of the nice comments.)

Hoping to avoid such reviews, the creators of "All Shook Up," the Elvis catalog show, have turned to an impeccable source: Shakespeare. The musical's director, Christopher Ashley ("The Rocky Horror Show"), said that he and the book writer, Joe DiPietro ("I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change"), had combed through an estimated 800 songs in the Elvis catalog -- written by numerous composers, including Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller -- before deciding to write a 1950's love story "poured through the funnel of a Shakespearean comedy."

Mr. Ashley said that the sheer size and variety of the Elvis catalog had made it relatively easy to find songs to fit that plot, which he says borrows elements from both "Twelfth Night" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

The use of Shakespeare, of course, is not going to appease many traditionalists who feel that the jukebox musical is a corruption of the classic method of making new musicals, where composer, lyricist and book writer work in tandem -- and in real time.

"A musical is supposed to be a collaboration," said Arthur Laurents, who wrote the books for "Gypsy" and "West Side Story." "You don't have a finished score and then work up a script to push it around. It's not to my taste, and I think it's hurting the musical theater."

It's not surprising, then, that many of the creators associated with catalog shows are loath to be lumped in the jukebox category. "We are not one of those catalog shows," said Don Scardino, the director of "Lennon," which goes into rehearsals in New York today. "The songs are designed to be sung in the context that they were written. They are not divorced from their context."

Mr. Scardino said that unlike, say, "Good Vibrations," which never mentions the Beach Boys, "Lennon" tells the story of John Lennon's life, from his Liverpool childhood to his Beatle days to his murder in 1980. "It's all basically John's words," Mr. Scardino said. "It's John Lennon telling his story and singing his songs." That said, Mr. Scardino emphasized that he did not want to do a show with a Lennon impersonator; instead, he is using a nine-member ensemble of male and female actors who take turns playing Lennon. "We're singing the songs as John, emotionally, from his point of view," he said.

Whether that kind of theatrical artifice satisfies critics or audiences remains to be seen. What is certain is that regardless of how they are put together, new musicals -- catalog or otherwise -- are never easy.

"Many musicals of this time start with a movie, so the story is a given," Mr. Ashley said. "With these muscials, there's a group of songs that's a given. I don't know if it's harder or easier. I think it's just hard to do musicals, period."